As the story progresses, a boy who is sharing his room with the stranger realises he has witnessed the man killing a woman.

The scene then shifts to acting out this narrative, which starts with Harold Dunlap inadvertently killing a woman with whom he has had a violent fight on the station platform.

He places her body on the open rear end of a departing train and then goes in search of a boarding house where he can hide out for a time.

After the film returns to the present, it is revealed that the mysterious stranger has an immediate and compelling interest in telling the story, and warns the woman not to get off the train when it stops.

Instead, she spots her former fiancé and leaves the train, where they fight and he kills her, revealing that she was the murder victim of the stranger's story.